


December 1978

by JPlash



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Christmas, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-27 23:50:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JPlash/pseuds/JPlash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the way out of charms, James and Marlene had jointly, enthusiastically put Lily officially in charge of all Christmas decorating for time immemorial, or at least until the end of seventh year, which was practically the same thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	December 1978

The glassy red baubles are mostly Lily’s own. The great big ones were from Marlene last year, possibly transfigured from oranges. The purple ones are Sirius, and as such Lily does _not_ smile as she hangs them. In fifth year, when they were first presented, she attempted to point out that the Gryffindor colours were, and are, red and gold. Sirius informed her that if she continued attempting to suppress his freedom of expression, he would be forced to take the matter to Dumbledore. She’d hexed him soundly and it hadn’t been worth an argument. The set of shimmery, transparent things were her Christmas present last year from Sirius and Remus. Glass and crystal, just a shade from colourless: a big airy blown shape that reflects the light like a sort of heavy, organic bubble; several icicles, twirling delicately down to rounded points; little crystal stars dotted with gold; and terribly intricate crystal snowflakes that feel breakable and perfect in her hands. Lily strongly suspects that Sirius’s contribution was the finance, and Remus’s was the taste. Sirius’s taste leans more toward the extravagant. Last autumn, he charmed several of his shirts to have multiple layers of collars.

The tree is no longer large enough to fit all of the decorations. Lily isn’t sure whether she’s proud or annoyed, or perhaps exasperated, or maybe just unsurprised. It seems appropriate that after six years of chasing her cohorts for contributions to make the tree less…sparse, having the problem solved should be another problem in itself. Lily’s not sure she’d feel right if decorating the seventh year tree lacked the overcomplication and stress so familiar from the sixth year tree, and the fifth year tree, and the fourth…it’s barely half a year until they’re out of here, after all, out of Hogwarts forever. Lily’s not sure she’s ready for things to start changing just yet.

Decorating the tree is supposed to be a communal activity. On the first day of December in their first year, the fifth and sixth year prefects rounded them all up, threatened Sirius Black and James Potter with complex fifth and sixth year methods of torture should they make Christmas decorating duties unnecessarily difficult, and instructed the eight Gryffindor first years to sit around one of the little trees that had appeared that morning in the common room. This was their tree, to be decorated collaboratively as they saw fit, with the understanding that complex fifth and sixth and possibly even seventh year methods of punishment would follow should what they ‘saw fit’ appear unfit to their prefects. Christmas was a grouchy time of year for prefects. Lily thought, after second year, that she understood why, and realised after her first Christmas as a prefect, in fifth year, that it was so much worse when you had to be responsible for the whole castle. It is tacitly accepted as fact and ancient lore among the prefects that Christmas decorating was, in the years of distant history, made a part of prefect duties solely so that the staff could escape it.

The seventh year tree is next to the first year, possibly in the hope that it might lend guidance and inspiration to the first years, possibly just because the common room is round. Fond as she is of their tree, Lily isn’t sure that she wants the first years to take inspiration. She tries to find branches a reasonable distance apart for each of the small herd of deer in her box, so that it won’t look like they’re conquering the tree by force of numbers. The deer are all presents from Sirius to James, amassed over the course of years, and Lily has given up understanding how the mind of Sirius Black possibly functions. She has an odd, inexplicable collection of deer to hang on the tree, and at least they’re mostly red and gold.

The collaborative nature of the tree’s decoration was terminated approximately half an hour after the departure of the prefects back in ’71. Liza Wood excused herself almost before the prefects were out of earshot; a polite but vehement expression of disapproval at the Christmas trappings smothering the Yule celebration. She still avoids most of the Christmas-themed events of Hogwarts December, not because she’s particularly invested in traditional ideas of Yule, but because she finds Christian holidays uncomfortable. It’s a fair objection, if not a very cheery one, and Lily has always let it be. Sirius was exiled, that first year, after a second bauble ‘accidentally’ smashed on Peter Pettigrew’s head. James went with him, twin expressions of exaggerated outrage, Peter said something obnoxious about not minding things dropped on him, and Remus Lupin hovered several moments before muttering something uncomfortable about making sure Peter didn’t have glass in his hair, then disappeared at their heels. The three remaining first years—Lily, Marlene McKinnon and Sara Bell—had levitated and fixed and sometimes just placed by hand the rest of the house-provided Gyrffindor baubles, a sparse smattering over the tinsel and the Hogwarts beads in four house colours and the pre-charmed lights. It looked a little sad compared to those other trees already decorated, each one crowded and strangely telling, little pieces of their owners tipping each branch.

The next morning, when the four girls came down from their dorm on the way to breakfast, the first year tree had sprouted an array of additional baubles, maybe not so shiny as the original few but striped and spotted and twirled in red and gold. It had taken Lily the better part of the night and a substantial number of patient hints from Eleanor Jordan in sixth year, but she was good in transfiguration, not as good as James and Sirius, perhaps, but really good, and she worked harder, and she’d found some round things to work with. The boys had extracted a confession by third period, and on the way out of charms, James and Marlene had jointly, enthusiastically put Lily officially in charge of all collaborative decorating for time immemorial, or at least until the end of seventh year, which was practically the same thing.

The job stuck. The velvety shapes with gold trim are from fourth year, when Lily sat them all down with fabric and gold braid and knives and sticking charms and let no one up again until they had presented a suitable ornament. That was the first of the deer—a shiny gold fabric one set before Lily with a massive grin directed entirely at James. James had glared at Sirius incredulously for at least two seconds before poorly attempting to conceal laughter in the bright red and gold star he was perfecting. He’d presented it to Lily, later, with an expression that was probably supposed to be charming and one of his worse lines—‘from one star to another’. Lily had rolled her eyes and ignored them both. The deer hadn’t seemed odd, then. Three years later, with two glass ones, a ceramic, a wooden puzzle sort of thing with a woollen scarf, a plush toy and even one painted rather prettily on a largish heart shape…well. The heart isn’t from Sirius of course, but James. All of the hearts are James: one a year, every year for Christmas since fifth year, because when James Potter finds something that works, he sticks to it.

This year’s heart is technically early, since Christmas is most of a month off yet, but early means it makes it on to their last tree. James gave it to her by the lake, ankle deep in snow, and she had to be careful not to drop it because she’s clumsy in mittens. He could give her gifts whenever, he said, now that they were dating. No need to wait ‘til Christmas. She’d remembered the stupid velvety star, and the Sirius-and-James collaborative paper elephant from third year when she’d first made them contribute on pain of destroying their stash of dungbombs, and the look on James’s face, bravado heavily punctured by nerves and silly boyish hopeful eagerness to please, as she unwrapped the second heart in sixth year, silly boyish James babbling “I know you just liked the one last year ‘cause it was beautiful but I thought this one’s pretty too so”…and the smile in her mind whispers ‘from one heart to another,’ and she doesn’t say it, because it would be unforgivably, irredeemably, someone-stun-me-now corny, but she does smile. She smiles at all of the decorations now, even the paper elephant.

Second year was hours of work on her part and practical jokes by the boys. Third was the elephant, and paper lantern-y things with tassles from Sara; a fantastic 3D star in charmed origami, gold and white from Marlene; a brightly patterned cut-out of a bauble from Peter. She and Remus had sat together one evening and after much trial and almost as much error with a few familiar charms and a stack of candles for wax, managed to create little 2D shapes like very thin stained glass, edged in gold and reasonably hardy. The ornaments are clumsy, both in magic and artistry, but it’s a good memory. Remus’s is a red-nosed reindeer, because Lily was singing the song for him, and it made him smile, and he didn’t do that much, in third year, though more than he had in first. Now it’s one of the many deer, the eldest of the herd. Lily’s is a dove with an olive branch, and if that’s sharper now than it was four years ago in a world at peace and dreaming of forever, it’s not a thought for now.

Fourth year, providing the boys with fabric and braid and rules avoided further elephants and colouring projects. Fifth year they’d all had enough spare change for Lily to demand that everyone buy an ornament, and that was Sirius’s purple, and the first of James’s hearts, the one too lovely a bauble to push back at him, though he certainly got nothing in return. There was a beaded tree shape and a sheepish grimace from Remus, who only had a very little spare change, and from Peter the little whitish glass ball with the painted silhouette of Hogsmeade, the one on sale in half a dozen windows in town, that everyone sends home to their grandparents. Marlene and Sara had done crystals together that year, red crystals dripping from gold filigree, and then lovely enamelled bells together the next. That was last year, and for the first time since first year, Liza had come over to the tree as Lily decorated, offered an armful of oiled and gold-tipped pine cones and allowed that there was some good to the whole decorating and holiday cheer affair, especially when their tree was much more winter celebration than religious occasion.

The pine cones are around the base of the tree now, with a few lovely festive branches liberated from the greenhouses by Peter. The standard Gryffindor baubles don’t fit on the tree anymore, with the accumulation of seven years of Hogwarts Christmas. Even the Hogwarts beads, gold with little hanging gems in green and yellow and blue and red, are left on the ground. They probably could fit, but Sirius and James, though largely tame now with regards to Christmas decorating duties, still reserve the right to object vehemently to other house colours in their common room, undermining their Quidditch spirit, and Lily is tempted to humour them. It is their last year.

She runs a critical eye over the tree before scooping up the school-colour ornaments and shuffling on her knees over to the first years’ spot. It’s still next to the seventh, and the tree is as sparsely covered as was hers six years ago. She leaves the beads, and the red baubles, in a little pile at the base, with a note. These first years, her first years, did do the job collaboratively—with the Head Girl and Head Boy watching the whole time. She can hardly expect them to transfigure extra ornaments as well. A little charity can’t hurt.

As she slides the topper, a gorgeous, graceful red glass thing that passes from seventh year to seventh year, onto the top spike of the little tree, Lily has to wonder what will become of all these ornaments. This is their last Christmas together; their last Christmas at Hogwarts. It’s too strange an idea to be real but real it is, and it’s coming quickly. It seems wrong to think of giving all these things back to their owners, splitting them eight ways, when they were all made to go together. But they won’t be together this time next year—they can’t. They’ll be gone their own ways—she and James have talked, sort of, about trying to stay in the same city, maybe, and she thinks Remus and Sirius have some sort of probably very hole-y plan, but the eight of them, here in Gryffindor tower strong as stone and a thousand years of Hogwarts history…

***

In bed at night in the girls dorm, after quiet compliments downstairs from Remus, and thumbs up from Marlene and Sara, and an only-just-visibly-smirking consideration of the merits of red and purple by Sirius, and thirty promises from James, declared at large and whispered between their lips, that it’s the most beautiful tree the school has ever seen…Lily smiles a dream on the edge of sleep.

 _The tree is tall enough almost to brush the roof, twice the size of their tree in the common room. James lifts her to place the topper, because if you levitate the topper it’s impossible to push it properly down into place, and because even though she never lets him lift her James does have the arms, all that Quidditch. Sirius is mixing too much warmth into the eggnog, and the hot chocolate, and the cider, which should not theoretically need more alcohol added, but someone’s left Sirius with the drinks so they should all really know what’s coming._

 _It’s not a familiar house, but it’s probably a pastiche of houses she’s known, humble ones, houses that new graduates could afford, but warm. There’s a fire in the hearth, and storybook snow outside the windows, and little charmed candles on the tree like the trees in the Great Hall always have. The windows are glazed and a little gold-rimmed like the clumsy things by she and Remus when their charms were still kids’ charms, and the drifting snow and the yellow light are things from stories that begin with ‘once upon a time’._

 _All of the deer are there, and the rest of the odds and ends, though the deer stick out. Peter and the girls are on the sofa, even Liza, eating shortbread and laughing at she and James, because everyone laughs at her with James, and that’s fine. Marlene yells at James through a mouthful of rumball not to knock the tree. Remus is at Sirius’s shoulder, hopefully taking note of what goes in what drink from which bottle. It’s Christmas, and they’re not at Hogwarts, will never be at Hogwarts again, after this, but it’s them, and it’s okay._

 _It’s Christmas, and they’re together, and surely that’s all that matters?_

 _It’s Christmas, and the Gryffindor girls and the ‘Marauders’ and their tree, and they’re living happily ever after._

**Author's Note:**

> Xmas fic this year has pictures! They'll be up in a minute at my DA: http://jkale.deviantart.com/ Go to the gallery for all three :)
> 
> Merry xmas to all, and all that jazz ;D
> 
> Regular readers: your regular, non-xmas-related fic will resume momentarily...and by momentarily, I mean after xmas :P Blame xmas! <3


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